Do you believe, if we may begin on a philosophical note, in the adult human’s
capacity for fundamental change?

Psychologists and other assorted experts on such deep and bemusing matters may disagree, but this know-nothing buffoon is with Dr Gregory House, Hugh Laurie’s majestically cynical diagnostician in the TV medical drama, one of whose mantras is “nobody changes”.

At least I thought I was with him until a sortie to the Telegraph websiteon Wednesday unearthed the mildly startling headline: “Tyson: I want to sing and dance in musicals.”

The sweet science’s power to astonish is boundless at the minute. A week after Andrew Flintoff announced his imminent relaunch as a heavyweight boxer, Tyson relegates Freddie’s career change to the tediously banal.

The former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, who “bad intentions” peaked with his stated desire to punch the opponent’s septum up into his brain, now wants to be Michael Crawford.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Last year he appeared on Argentina’s version of Strictly Come Dancing, where he was presumably introduced with the Spanish version of ring announcer Michael Buffer’s “Let’s get ready to rumba”, and recently performed a one-man show, as directed by Spike Lee, on Broadway. He also showed genuine talent for acting when appearing in a short, funny spoof, on a US chat show, of the The King’s Speech, in which he tried to improve the rhetorical skills of George W Bush.

Perhaps the most surprising element to Tyson’s belated discovery of his artistic soul is that, on reflection, it isn’t all that surprising after all. Although once and long dismissed as a raging Caliban of a dunce, he always struck me as a very bright and sensitive man who had been desensitised by his unspeakably brutal Brooklyn childhood. He grew up to commit a crime for which there is no semblance of an excuse.

But those who styled him a monster long before he did time for rape and mistook Evander Holyfield’s earlobe for an energy snack seemed too glibly to disregard the dehumanising effects of watching his mother die in screaming agony from untreated cancer, and being viciously bullied by older boys who tore the heads of his beloved pigeons and taunted him, thanks to that lisp, as “fairy boy”.

Those bullies may now wonder whether his nickname was devolved from the cockney rhyming slang term “Iron hoof”, such is the stereotyping of the male hoofer. Published in Wednesday’s Daily Mail, for example, was this sentence concerning the dancer, choreographer and Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli’s flirtation, long ago, with hallucinogens.

“He eventually found himself crying in a cinema,” it revealed of the occasion Tonioli emerged from an LSD-induced blackout, “watching repeat screenings of Barbra Streisand’s musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, still wrapped in a fur coat.” Could it get any gayer than that?

As one of the most infamously straight men alive, Tyson would probably be secure enough to take roles from which previous ex-fighters who tried their luck as actors might have baulked.

Jake LaMotta played a barman in the film noire classic The Hustler, and a later middleweight champion took the same route, though I’ve never seen a Marvelous Marvin Hagler movie or met anyone who has. Yet only Tyson, one feels, would take the lead in Les Cage Aux Folles.

Whether any boxing champ has ever before become a star of musicals on the Broadway or West End stage is unlikely (metamorphoses of the kind tend not to evade the notice).

But lack of precedent is no reason to assume that it cannot be done, or that Tyson wouldn’t knock ’em dead as Captain Von Trapp (he would hardly need the whistle to bring those kids to order), The Producers’s Max Bialystock, or even – cast to type here given his track record as a voice coach – Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady.

One thing in all this confusion does at least seem plain. Reasoning that even if he has changed, he hasn’t changed that much, even the bravest theatre critics such as our own Charles Spencer will pull their punches if Mike Tyson floats like a butterball turkey in the dance numbers, and sings like a B Forsyth.